The Great Chinese Exodus

Many Chinese are leaving for cleaner air, better schools and more opportunity. But Beijing is keeping its eye on them.

A recent report showed that 64% of China's rich are either migrating overseas or have plans to leave the country. Political scientist James To, who has written a book on the subject, tells the WSJ's Deborah Kan how the Chinese government is using propaganda campaigns abroad to ensure loyalty from overseas Chinese.

Even when the emperors did their utmost to keep them at home, the Chinese ventured overseas in search of knowledge, fortune and adventure. Manchu Qing rulers thought those who left must be criminals or conspirators and once forced the entire coastal population of southern China to move at least 10 miles inland.

But even that didn't put an end to wanderlust. Sailing junks ferried merchants to Manila on monsoon winds to trade silk and porcelain for silver. And in the 19th century, steamships carried armies of "coolies" (as they were then called) to the mines and plantations of the European empires.

Today, China's borders are wide open. Almost anybody who wants a passport can get one. And Chinese nationals are leaving in vast waves: Last year, more than 100 million outbound travelers crossed the frontiers.

Most are tourists who come home. But rapidly growing numbers are college students and the wealthy, and many of them stay away for good. A survey by the Shanghai research firm Hurun Report shows that 64% of China's rich—defined as those with assets of more than $1.6 million—are either emigrating or planning to.

To be sure, the departure of China's brightest and best for study and work isn't a fresh phenomenon. China's communist revolution was led, after all, by intellectuals schooled in Europe. What's new is that they are planning to leave the country in its ascendancy. More and more talented Chinese are looking at the upward trajectory of this emerging superpower and deciding, nevertheless, that they're better off elsewhere.

The decision to go is often a mix of push and pull. The elite are discovering that they can buy a comfortable lifestyle at surprisingly affordable prices in places such as California and the Australian Gold Coast, while no amount of money can purchase an escape in China from the immense problems afflicting its urban society: pollution, food safety, a broken education system. The new political era of President Xi Jinping, meanwhile, has created as much anxiety as hope.

Another aspect of this massive population outflow hasn't yet drawn much attention. Whatever their motives and wherever they go, those who depart will be shadowed by the organs of the Leninist state they've left behind. A sprawling bureaucracy—the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council—exists to ensure that distance from the motherland doesn't dull their patriotism. Its goal is to safeguard loyalty to the Communist Party.

This often sets up an awkward dynamic between Chinese arrivals and the societies that take them in. While the newcomers try to fit in, Beijing makes every effort to use them in its campaign to project its political values, enhance its global image, harass its opponents and promote the use of standard Mandarin Chinese over the dialects spoken in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Politics, though, isn't the most important issue on the mind of Ms. Sun, a 34-year-old Beijing resident who's bailing out. (She requested anonymity because she doesn't want publicity to spoil her plans.) The main reason she's planning to pack up: Her 6-year-old daughter is asthmatic, and Beijing's chronic pollution irritates the girl's lungs. "Breathing freely is a basic requirement," she says. The girl also has a talent for music, art and storytelling that Ms. Sun fears China's test-driven schools won't nurture.

Recently, Ms. Sun flew to San Francisco to shop for a school for her daughter, browse for property and handle the paperwork for permanent U.S. residency. She insists that she's not leaving China forever—a sentiment expressed by many on their way out who see a foreign passport as an insurance policy in case things go badly wrong in China.

"I'm just giving my family another option," she says.

A college professor, who insisted on anonymity altogether ("Just call me an intellectual," he says), takes a darker view of China's prospects as he prepares to emigrate to the U.S., joining his two children, who both have postgraduate degrees from U.S. colleges.

Like many Chinese academics, the professor has a business or two on the side, although he hardly looks the part of an executive, unshaven and with crumpled pants riding 6 inches above his open sandals. In China, he pronounces, "Once you get rich, they arrest you."

That is an exaggeration, of course, but there is a propensity for entrepreneurs who appear on lists of the richest Chinese to end up in jail.

His real concern is that to get ahead, he's had to make compromises with his principles (he doesn't say bribes, but that is what he means). "I've been forced to prostitute myself," he says, and now he worries that it could all be snatched away. In China, a weak, corrupt legal system may sometimes work in favor of entrepreneurs while they're clawing their way up, cutting corners along the way, but it is almost always a liability once they've made it.

First-generation businessmen—the ones who powered China's economic rise—now dream of a secure retirement. That means legal safety in places like the U.S. and Canada.

The professor is also a fan of U.S. technology. One of his companies sells environmental equipment, and he's hoping that by living in America, he'll find ways to enhance his products and develop new ones—which he hopes to continue to sell in China, the biggest market. He holds up his Apple iPhone. "How many shirts do you think we Chinese have to export to buy one of these phones?" he asks.

China, he concludes, is still "a very backward country."

The flight of the rich recalls similar outflows from Hong Kong before the 1997 handover of the then-British colony to China and from Taiwan in an earlier period when its own future seemed imperiled. In those cases, businesspeople parked their families in places like Vancouver and Seattle and shuttled back and forth to Asia for business.

That is often the strategy in today's China, which has entered an uncertain transition. The economy is off the boil; property prices are sliding. Mr. Xi has amassed more power than any Chinese leader since Deng Xiaoping and is using it to crack down on corrupt officials while going after human rights lawyers, bloggers and civil society activists. That is ridding China of the kind of individual its government doesn't want but is also scaring away the creative types it needs.

Last year, the U.S. issued 6,895 visas to Chinese nationals under the EB-5 program, which allows foreigners to live in America if they invest a minimum of $500,000. South Koreans, the next largest group, got only 364 such visas. Canada this year closed down a similar program that had been swamped by Chinese demand.

Some of the wealth sluicing out of China is undoubtedly ill-gotten gains. The Chinese central bank estimates that corrupt officials may have siphoned off as much as $123 billion since the mid-1990s.

In his book "Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750," the historian Odd Arne Westad writes that overseas Chinese "were, and are, the glue that holds China's relations with the world together, in good times and bad."

That explains why Beijing takes an intense pastoral interest in the Chinese diaspora. It has some 48 million members—about double the number of Indians living outside their country—and wherever they alight, they tend to rise to the top, be it Silicon Valley or the high-tech corridors of Southeast Asia.

Beijing makes a crucial distinction between ethnic Chinese who have acquired foreign nationality and those who remain Chinese citizens. The latter category is officially called huaqiao—sojourners. Together, they are viewed as an immensely valuable asset: the students as ambassadors for China, the scientists, engineers, researchers and others as conduits for technology and industrial know-how from the West to propel China's economic modernization.

In 1989, when the Tiananmen Square massacre triggered an outflow of traumatized students and shattered the Party's image among overseas Chinese communities, the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office kicked into high gear with a propaganda campaign to repair the damage. It proved highly successful.

China Real Time

The political scientist James Jiann Hua To, the author of "Qiaowu: Extra-Territorial Policies for the Overseas Chinese," says that the campaign "turned around the way most overseas Chinese look at China." (Read a Q&A with James Jiann Hua To.)

The effort continues. It is subtle—a hearts-and-minds campaign that works through overseas Chinese newspapers, websites (digital "New Chinatowns," in propaganda-speak), schools, youth groups and church organizations.

The results show up in "patriotic" street activities. In 2008, for instance, well-organized Chinese students guarded the Olympic torch as it went around the world ahead of the Beijing Games, attracting raucous protests from Tibetan independence activists and other hostile groups. The following year, Chinese students disrupted the Melbourne Film Festival when it screened a movie about the life of exiled Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer, whom Beijing accuses of stirring up separatist agitation in its Xinjiang region. Similar protesters dog the footsteps around the world of the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, whom Beijing also accuses of "splittist" activities.

Foreigners sometimes have a hard time understanding why Beijing expends so much effort countering threats, real or imagined, from Chinese opponents overseas, including the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement. But China's leaders are haunted by history. To an extraordinary degree, the destiny of modern China has been shaped by the Chinese who left. The overseas Chinese of Southeast Asia provided critical support for Sun Yat-sen's 1911 revolution, which toppled the Qing.

The dynamic works the other way too. When Deng needed money and expertise to unlock the entrepreneurial energies of China in the early 1980s, he first tapped the mega-rich Chinese tycoons in Hong Kong, Thailand and Malaysia, whose factories populated his Special Economic Zones.

ENLARGE

A Chinese tourist poses in front of the Sydney Opera House in Australia, June 18, 2013.
Reuters

But China's cross-border political activities are creating unease. Consider Australia—one of the most popular destinations for Chinese students, emigrants and tourists, and a country where Mandarin Chinese is now the second-most widely spoken language after English.

"Chinese Australians are being lectured, monitored, organized and policed in Australia on instruction from Beijing as never before," wrote John Fitzgerald of Swinburne University of Technology, one of the country's foremost China experts, in an article published in the Asan Forum, the online journal of the Asan Institute, a South Korean think tank.

In the U.S., a vigorous debate has broken out in academic circles about the role on American campuses of Confucius Institutes, which are sponsored by the Chinese government and offer Mandarin-language classes, along with rosy cultural views of China. Critics say these institutes threaten academic independence; supporters say they offer valuable language training that would not otherwise be available. In June, the American Association of University Professors stepped into the controversy and recommended that universities "cease their involvement" with the institutes unless they can gain "unilateral control" over them.

China must be exceedingly careful not to leave too many fingerprints on its political activities offshore. For a start, it has an official policy of noninterference in the internal affairs of other countries. But it also puts established overseas Chinese communities at risk by raising the issue of their national loyalties. That is particularly true in Southeast Asia, where the Chinese of a previous era were often viewed with suspicion as a communist fifth column.

Still, the sheer volume of China's outbound travel these days, and its massive economic impact, gives it new leverage. In the global market for high-end real estate, Chinese buying has become a key driver of prices. According to the U.S. National Association of Realtors, Chinese buyers snapped up homes worth $22 billion in the year ending in March.

Australia called a parliamentary inquiry to find out whether local households were being priced out of the market by Chinese money. (The conclusion: not yet.)

Without fee-paying Chinese students, many colleges in the postrecession Western world simply wouldn't be able to pay the bills. Chinese students are by far the largest group of foreign students on U.S. campuses, and their numbers jumped 21% last year from the year before—to 235,597, according to the Institute of International Education. Their numbers are increasing at a similar pace in Australia. In England, there are now almost as many Chinese students as British ones studying full-time for postgraduate master's degrees.

Tourism is booming again thanks to China. The Chinese have overtaken Americans to become the world's biggest tourist spenders—and they're rapidly moving upmarket. Mei Zhang, the founder of Beijing's high-end travel operator WildChina, offers family holidays to destinations such as Kenya, Patagonia and Alaska at $10,000 per head. Chinese are now the third-largest group of nationals landing in Antarctica, where tourists zip around the ice floes in Zodiac inflatables to watch penguins.

The international hotel industry is increasingly tailoring its service to Chinese tastes. Among the required extras these days: teapots and toothbrushes. Russell Brice, the founder of the expedition firm Himalayan Experience, says that he packs duck and chicken feet—Chinese delicacies—along with the climbing gear for his Chinese clients. "A few little things like that make it special," he says.

And the outflow has only just begun. The Hong Kong-based brokerage firm CLSA forecasts that departures from China will double to 200 million by 2020.

In education, the next big wave coming from China is high schoolers. Rich parents are opting out of an education system that prepares children to take high-stakes tests for college entrance but neglects the creative side. Besides, once they've been through the mill, the students have a tendency to kick back when they get to college.

Xie Li, a manager at a Beijing telecommunications company, says that she tried to push her 16-year-old son to go to high school overseas, but he couldn't bear to leave home so early. He's a star pupil at the middle school attached to Beijing Normal University, which First Lady Michelle Obama visited recently.

Still, the boy is being groomed for college overseas and an international life. At 13, his parents packed him off to spend six weeks with an American family in Virginia. They've taken family breaks in exotic places like Tanzania. And now, to his mother's delight, he's set a goal for himself to study chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Ms. Xie recognizes that he might never come back but says, "His heart will always be with his family."

The Chinese government has no desire to slow the flow of students. Its attitude is simple: Why not have the Americans or Europeans train our brightest minds if they want to? President Xi's own daughter went to Harvard.

As always with China, the numbers awe. In his memoirs, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser, recalls a meeting between President Jimmy Carter and Deng. Human rights were on Mr. Carter's agenda, and he started needling the Chinese leader about Beijing's tight emigration policies. "Fine. We'll let them go," Deng snapped. "Are you prepared to accept 10 million?"

Not even Deng could have imagined the human torrent his "open door" reforms would eventually unleash. Try 100 million—and counting.

Corrections & Amplifications

The writing that referenced Chinese Australians was published in the Asan Forum, the online journal of the Asan Institute, a South Korean think tank. An earlier version of this article incorrectly cited the Asan Forum as a South Korean think tank (Aug. 27).

"Without fee-paying Chinese students, many colleges in the postrecession Western world simply wouldn't be able to pay the bills. Chinese students are by far the largest group of foreign students on U.S. campuses, and their numbers jumped 21% last year from the year before—to 235,597, according to the Institute of International Education. ."

I wish the author would tell us what schools a mere 235,000 Chinese students are keeping open.

If we supported our own public universities the way we should, many of those places would be filled with an American. I am especially concerned about public universities giving places to undergraduate overseas students. Those places were created by American taxpayers in the 50 states primarily for their own people.

Some of the lowest ranking STEM programs in the US are almost entirely foreign students now. I wonder who is lying to these kids and their parents, telling them how great their school is and that they'll be able to stay after graduation?

I greatly resent the picture of a US welcoming a class of crooks from overseas.

I do not care how much money they have, I do not care about the conditions in China that they are fleeing (and that these elites largely created, for themselves and everybody else in China).

I do not want them here. I do not want us to "sell" US green cards at all, but I especially do not want us to sell them for a mere $500,000 a family.

Most of all, I have never read an article before in which the elite of another country proposed to come here and in which the US is portrayed as an open border country for those elite to enter and take up residency at will, with every confidence that we will accept them and that they will make the US a better place.

China needs to separate itself from its political communist system. Politics can be generated by the party but a separate system of elections and governance needs to be employed by the party. Laws and rights need to be permanent. For instance, internal communist elections can nominate multiple candidates for terms of office and gain acceptance by the citizenry by having them consummate a winner by vote. This ensures acceptance by majority, loyalty through mutual participation, and a separation of law generators and politics. It can also guarantee values by constituting them in writing a constitution, and guarantee obedience and repeatability by appointing independent judiciary members.

Rule of law is the big question. As strange as this might sound, the communist party of china is at the point America was when they had to develop a federal system. Without relinquishing some political control, China will eventually fold and Russia will gobble up even more of Chinas future as well as present. The party should choose two or more candidates for each constituted government office of limited powers, such as in the US.

There are two problems: "No tyranny can exert inducements as well as punishments. As is today, justice rotates upon what some communist special interest happens to be. It can change tomorrow. Two, without property rights guaranteed by written constitutions and a firm law giving system, investments can never magnify itself. In that case, 2 billion people might as well be 2 million. Nobody has any interest in supporting the machine without incentives and punishment. What you support today could be a state enemy tomorrow. That is destructive uselessness.

They are moving out of gut feelings of insecurity with Chinas future and their limited opportunities living there ,sure there are double agents among them but once they get out they want to mostly stay out .

"Last year, the U.S. issued 6,895 visas to Chinese nationals under the EB-5..."

That's a relatively small quantity. The whole issue is nothing more than a superficial speculation. That Hurun's report, If it were to have any credibility at all, it certainly isn't reflected in the above report.

I wonder why the West always equate people outside China identifying themselves as Chinese with their being loyal to China, or CCP.

Chinese is similar to the Jews. I guess there is a reason why many call them the Jews of the East they are everywhere but no matter where they are they identify themselves as Chinese mostly in a cultural sense. Being Chinese outside China is more about the cultural identification than loyalty. By cultural identification, I mean the way they live their lives, the food they eat, the holidays the observe, the values and traditions they uphold or trying to uphold, the language they speak or able to speak (as 2nd language), the stories they heard or history they know and pass down to their children. Many Chinese never set their foot in China in their life time, especially for many older & poor ones. I personally know many Vietnamese Chinese who fled Vietnam in the 70s claim they are Chinese because their ancestors were and they still live a Chinese way of life.

64% of the Chinese wealthy want to leave their country. Hmmm...This is about the same percentage of California's wealthy that want to leave California. And for the same reason. They don't want their money stolen from them.

"Last year, the U.S. issued 6,895 visas to Chinese nationals under the EB-5 program, which allows foreigners to live in America if they invest a minimum of $500,000. South Koreans, the next largest group, got only 364 such visas."

China has 28 times the population of South Korea. 364 x 28 = 10,192 a figure far bigger than 6,895. What is really the point? Running out of things to write about China? How insightful this author is!

Canadians actions were not due to the large number of Chinese but for many other reasons.

Ask any Chinese under 35 years old about Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council and the concept of huaqiao, they would be lost.

Overseas Chinese (or huaqiao) is such a last century thing of China. Back in the late 70s when China just woke up and started to open up to the outside world. Anything foreign was a big deal including overseas Chinese who were cut off from mainland China since 1949.

Further, the most impact on China's economy in early days from the so called overseas Chinese this author makes a big deal out of it were those from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore and other SE Asian countries not the ones in North America at all. These were the first Chinese to send money (qiao hui vs wai hui) and first to come to set up factories.

Regardless, with millions of foreigners from all over Asia, North America, Europe and elsewhere living, studying or working in China, this huaqiao thing is such an outdated and stretched subject. Very telling about this author though.

Its fascinating that newly wealthy Chinese are fleeing to the U.S. and freedom, to escape an all powerful authoritarian regime, Obama is doing his best to turn the U.S. a giant, Government controlled and dominated, society ruled by a left wing authoritarian regime. Look at China and you know what Obama and the democrats have to be rejected in the United States as they try and transform the USA. into a place that resembles China, but has much higher tech to spy upon and control every move we make. Obama is a dictator wannabe working hard to destroy our Constitution and impose his Marxist vision on the nation. If you support Obama go find one of these Chines that have fled here and ask them what it means if people like Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi succeed.

The best source on 'Chinese' technology is 'Chinese Industrial Espionage,' 2013. This is not a polemic, it is a painstaking and penetrating analysis, part of a scholarly series 'Asian Security Studies' of 30+ books.

It begins: 'This new book is the first full account, inside or outside government, of China's efforts to acquire foreign technology. Based on primary sources and meticulously researched, the book lays bare China's efforts to prosper technologically through others' achievements. For decades China has operated an elaborate system to spot foreign technologies, acquire them by all conceivable means, and convert them into weapons and competitive goods--without compensating the owners.'

Everyone copies, but China has an enormous infrastructure devoted to doing only that, and they're the best at manufacturing others' designs.

The strongly pro-H-1B Berkeley professor AnnaLee Saxenian gushes over the fact that more than 80% of the Indian and Chinese engineers in Silicon Valley share technological information with firms in their home countries, with over half investing in tech back home.

So all this wonderful globalization, which is praised to the skies by all scribes who know which side their bread is buttered on, leads people to move American technology and jobs to much lower wage countries in Asia. Globalists promised that global wages would quickly equalize, but actually programmers' wages in India are 20%, even 10% of what they are here.

Globalism is premised on the idea that as China developed it was bound to liberalize politically and become a leader alongside the U.S. in helping to manage world problems, through, eg, the IMF. Unfortunately, China IS the problem. They ally with unsavory dictatorships as in Sudan, Mayanmar and Iran, and threaten and bully their neighbors in the nearby seas.

"The latter category is officially called huaqiao—sojourners. Together, they are viewed as an immensely valuable asset: . . . the scientists, engineers, researchers and others as conduits for technology and industrial know-how from the West to propel China's economic modernization."

@Ashley King Chinese Communist Party members are afraid of their citizens rather than being conjointly combined with them to form a national purpose. They need to see the wisdom here and learn the value of change and innovation. The God of Dielectric Materialism is so far a deity of unforgiving majesty.

I think your brush is too broad. There are some merits on SOME of the Chinese who arrived in the US (last 10 to 15 years) who came here for economic and material reasons only, and who have a hard time to "melt" into mainstream American culture. Those are the ones would never want to be naturalized to become US citizens. Green cards entitle them to all economic, legal and some political rights (except voting). They are here for convenience and quality of life. But the vast numbers that left China in late 70s to late 90s are probably a very different kind. I speak from my own experience, they treasure living in democracy. So are generations of Chinese living here having no ties to China but to the Chinese culture (to which they identify themselves as Chinese as a way of life), I would never put such conclusion. I know kids in my family circles, they were all born, raised and educated here. They could not be more American (e.g. they will pick American food over Chinese).

@Howard WANG chinese way of communist dictator ship very cruel and heinous by 200 in nos only of their ruling elite is going to die its own death because none of these ever growing aspirants millions in nos today, to leave China the moment they become rich, want to return to their present day china, and their nos is ever growing in geometric progression -is crossing all limits and becoming un controllable by chinese military as was done in TIENANMEN sq long back.

Californians are trying to prevent their money being stolen by Sacramento and DC, many rich Chinese on the other hand are trying to do the opposite: preventing being caught for stealing money from their government.

Interestingly, one group want to leave California, the other group who are fleeing from their government in Beijing are coming to California.

So you measure an article's credibility by whether there is a mentioning of Tiananmen Massacre or how it words the incident. If the wording were to be changed to Tiananmen Incident, this article would pass your credibility test?

And since when you trusted Japanese news media over American or British? Not saying the report is factually correct or not? Just wondering if it is your habit of grabbing anything anywhere from any source as long they reported what you like to hear? And lastly did you read this article at all? Do you want to add your share of knowledge or thoughts or the subject at all?

"...promote the use of Mandarin Chinese in Hong Kong and Taiwan". I can see in Hong Kong (Cantonese decedents), but Taiwan? Taiwan's majority population does speak Mandarin but that was due to Nationalists decades' rule of Taiwan having nothing to do with China. The wider use of Mandarin inside mainland China in recent decades is mainly powered by the new economical reality (freed up economy and massive movements of population result in the real and urgent need to communicate with each other, people in my hometown no longer speaks local dialect, why? Because a 600,000 population has bloomed to 7 million mostly due to people from vast inland China with their own dialects. No need for government to "force" anyone to speak Mandarin. Everyone must speak mandarin to communicate and live together. I have to speak English to a Cantonese friend here, I don't think English would be a choice of communication in China any time soon

Don't kid yourself. The US have been and will always be the troublemaker in chief of the world. And the American Democracy is nothing more than a plutocracy in disguise.

"Most Americans wake up every morning believing that they live in a democracy. We have the right to vote, the right to work, and the right to freely express our opinions without threat of imprisonment or worse. Our political leaders often tout the United States as being a democracy of and for the people. We even spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year spreading this democratic influence to the rest of the world. - "

The conduits today are not huqiao or industrial spies from any country. The conduits are globalization in everything.

You can patent or protect certain technologies of Google, Ebay but you can't prevent China's equivalent to emerge on their own land. You can patent or protect certain technologies in high speed railway building or free way system but you can't prevent them from building their owns.

Industrial espionage does exit and China is probably one of the most active one. But in the end nothing compares with globalization we live in. Multi-national corporations' spreading presence around the world (often in the form of joint ventures: share and trade technology for access to foreign markets) is the real sources of sharing and spreading "immensely valuable asset".

@Howard WANG I will agree with you that my brush may be a little broad.

And I agree that Chinese are not any different than that of other nomadic peoples seeking a better life.

I do find the Chinese very studious and smart, that may be more about having Tiger moms, or families that place education above everything else, or culture. There is nothing wrong with any of that, and we have a lot to learn from them. But everyone's mileage vary's, and some of the Chinese that I have come across lately, or have read about, are very "Pro" China. I don't know if it is pride, culture, or think that Chinese need to have a better standing in the world. I don't know what is driving it.

I don't fear powerful Chinese in the world. What I fear is Chinese that have no humanity...and think that power commands respect.

They already have the respect, but again...perception is everything, and a culture that steeps itself in perception, like tea in hot water, may find that control with both hands is not enough.

Not all Chinese are from China. Not all Chinese are the same. Not all Chinese come to CA for the same reasons.

Many came from mainland China to give birth of their children to gain US citizenship (became a cottage industry and was widely reported on print and TV news media). And there are some who stole money from government or took bribes are fleeing China to CA because the Chinese community there make it a easier place for them to live (no English skills are needed to live in CA as a Chinese).

I hope people will not loosely use the word Chinese. Heck, there are TENS of millions of people living in Taiwan (and Singapore & rest of SE Asia alone) that identify themselves as Chinese (in a TRADITIONAL cultural sense only) but could not be more different than the ones from mainland China (value wise) even though they speak the same language and like to eat the same kind of food.

@Howard WANG@peter wolf The new Chinese see a comfortable state and if they come in with money the state does not take it from them so they can buy a lot here. To earn money in this state that is a challenge given how much is taken out of your earn income for you do better outside this states.

The technic business is in it own class in calif to generate wealth and there is degree of protection for they have political influence. Even Apple is looking out side this state to increase their business. There is rich history of Chinese influence in this State so it can be very comfortable here.

The down side to Calif is its ever increasing state Debt that will be called in someday and the fools that run this state will do the wrong thing. The public schools just like in China are bad but here you have private schools for the wealthy. To learn to make money is here but to make money is out of this state.

Mr. Wang: When the question of 'ownership' of money arises, how are we to determine whose money is being stolen when the government confiscates money from its citizens and whose money is being stolen when it is acquired by citizens when it is earned or otherwise acquired within the confines of a government established economic system.

You seem to come down on the side believing that the government has legitimate claim to all money without regard to the current possessor of that money.

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